


carpe diem, seize the day (but not the cat that ran away)

by jazzfic



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Community: help_japan, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-09
Updated: 2011-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-19 04:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/196977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Pan (the cat, not the boy) is lost in a heaving metropolis where bat signals are paw prints and Penny writes a mean flier. Or...something of the like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	carpe diem, seize the day (but not the cat that ran away)

**Author's Note:**

> A help_japan fic for trippy41, who asked for gen with a s/p flavour, or s/p with a gen flavour. Written with apologies to dead poets and lost pets of the world.

The eight-hour shift to end all eight-hour shifts found Penny loitering by the ground floor mail boxes, ignoring bills and flicking with mild interest through a book of coupons. Just as she was beginning to calculate how much she could afford to spend on take-out this month (answer: zero, time to look cute and borrow from Leonard again) a pattering of footsteps and rough squeak of the door sliding open made her turn. She took in the dripping polka dot umbrella and curly white hair of the new arrival, and offered a friendly wave.

"Hi, Mrs. Barnaby. Still raining, huh?"

"Oh dear..."

Though the greeting was mostly returned, there was an anxious tremor in the older woman's voice which had Penny pocketing her mail and stepping across at once. "Has something happened?"

"It's Peter Pan. He slipped out my door like a mad thing, and now I can't find him."

Peter Pan was a slightly aged and generally forgetful cat. His real name was Prince Bolkonsky—gifted by a previous owner whose passion for Russian literature had extended to felines and hamsters—but he had never responded to that rather grand moniker, so Mrs. Elsa Barnaby of apartment 2A, 2311 North Los Robles, Pasadena, had taken to calling him after that favorite eternal boy of her childhood. It suited them much better, for Peter the cat was half-deaf, and as his current mistress was hard of hearing herself, they made a happy couple.

"Has he run away before?" Penny asked, the practical, no-nonsense side of her that had wrangled heifers and unbroken horses at her father's bidding keen to establish facts. Tea and sympathy could (and would) come later.

"No, never."

She smiled gently. "Then let me help. I was always the star retriever in my family. My dad said he'd bet real money that I'd find a needle in a haystack. Can't remember if I ever did, but I'm sure I can find Peter for you. How about it?"

A hand, kind and full of thanks, fell on Penny's arm. "Would you, dear? I'm at a loss."

Penny smiled again, though this was as much for show as anything else. It was easy to say _Of course I will_. Much harder, though, to guarantee any sort of outcome that didn't involve a great and messy farce.

 

 

Perhaps unwisely, she drew up a flier that could be could pasted onto letterboxes and lampposts, gas station counters and launderette windows. Unwisely because she had made that common mistake of acting on her own initiative rather than seek out the approval of Sheldon and Sheldon's fierce and impenetrable logic. But she thought it looked pretty good—a photocopy (slightly blurred) of said cat, and a concise plea for information scrawled across the bottom half of the page with just the right amount of whimsy to pull at the emotions of even the most iron-clad of hearts.

She should have just shown it to Leonard and done the canvassing alone. That had been Penny's original plan, but Leonard's response, while running out the door to a lecture he was supposed to be giving to a bunch of seniors at a college he'd never heard of, in a part of town he'd never been to ("I'm going out for a talk," she heard him call back to whoever was inside, presumably Sheldon, "I may be some time...") was to glance once at the flier she waved under his nose, and say, "Sorry, Penny. No time. But good luck with that!"

And then he was gone, and there was Sheldon, looking blankly up at her from his spot, and Penny was left with the sinking knowledge that the evening was only going to go one way from here. And on the proverbial hill, that way wasn't up.

"Hey," she said, wandering in. "So I guess Leonard's not coming back any time soon?"

Sheldon pursed his lips delicately. "Not if those students have any sense in their naive and ignorant heads, he's not."

With a sigh she sank into the armchair and stared into the middle distance. After a moment or two of carefully bending her head to see what he was reading—she was able to only just make out the heaving form of the Hulk in the gaps between Sheldon's long fingers, before he angled it away, tsking softly at her nosiness—Penny folded her arms, and muttered, "Great."

"Yes it is, rather," Sheldon said, not really listening.

There followed another minute of this, with Penny shooting glances in Sheldon's direction, and Sheldon in turn feigning extreme non-interest, until he eventually relented, closed his comic and looked her over. "While this game of who can speak first is truly fascinating, I am hereby going to give up my ground, mix my metaphors and fold. _What_ is it that you actually need?"

Penny grinned brightly, as if this had been the plan all along. "Here," she said, and tossed him the flier.

Sheldon held out the paper at arms length as if it might leap out and bite him. She watched his eyes move and a flicker of mild disdain settle on his face. "Oh, Penny," he sighed.

"Oh, Sheldon," she mimicked, not unkindly.

"If this is the extent to your rescue mission, then I'm afraid little Peter Pan is doomed, much like Leonard's Captain Oates, to never return." He placed the flier on the table and folded his hands together.

Penny waited patiently, quite aware of what was coming. Like clockwork, the disdain morphed slowly into the hard, flinty gaze of a man with an idea. "Nevertheless..." Sheldon rubbed his chin.

It was frightening how well she knew him. Well, sometimes. Sometimes not. Frightening could also be nice.

 

 

He came to the task with systematic precision. No contingency was absent, no situation unaccounted for. She didn't bother pointing out that this was only a runaway cat, not two young heroes fighting for justice in a heaving metropolis fantasy, because there's being hypocritical and then there's being hypocritical on an Oscar winning level, and she'd be damned if she didn't hold on to that role as long as she had a dream in her heart and (fake) Chanel flats on her feet. Fortunately Sheldon, for all his fist-clenching irritations and morale-sapping drive, had enough sense to voice this himself, in a tone of grave finality, his eyes fixed to Penny's as if their lives depended on it.

"We must remember the greater good," he said as he packed the fliers into his messenger bag. The fliers, incidentally, which had finally passed the editor's red pen, Penny having relented and allowed Sheldon to add Peter Pan's vital statistics in eye-wateringly small fine print at the bottom of the page; along with a cautionary note of how, in her doddering age, the innocent feline's owner had neglected to install a microchip, and was therefore, technically, the real one at fault. "It is not merely a cat we are searching for," Sheldon continued, "but the return to this digital age of an old fashioned sense of compassion and civil honor." At her blank look, he blinked and intoned, "Help thy neighbor?"

Penny narrowed her eyes. "I thought you hated all that homespun godliness."

Sheldon narrowed his eyes right on back, the corners of his lips turning up ever so slightly. "Only when it's true," he said.

She relented, looking away with a smile. And without thinking to warn him, or thinking much herself, she reached across the space of the open door and touched the palm of her hand against his chest; the wide S on bright, electric blue, held it there for a moment and felt the warmth spread quietly underneath. "Come on then, Superman," she said. "Let's go do that greater good."

 

 

So it began. Sheldon was keeper of the fliers and Penny the voice of reason. They circled the neighboring blocks, a container of _Meow Mix_ in hand to rattle in moments of quiet when the traffic thinned and the air was clear, and all she could hear were their footsteps, wet prints in the concrete, twinned through puddles and mud. The rain fell in misty showers, too brief to worry over, though she was thankful at his insistence that an umbrella be brought. She expected him to complain but he remained silent throughout, consulting his phone to see how far they'd gone and how far they could conceivably continue before the light would start to fade. This was Sheldon in his element, with calculations to keep him occupied while Penny hailed down passers by, mothers with prams, kids with dogs, asking had they seen a small ginger cat with a blue collar and kinked-out tail? At the reply of no she would reach into Sheldon's bag, hand out the fliers and explain their mission in a quiet voice while he examined his formulas and the surroundings, eyes narrowed to the horizon as if a bat signal might suddenly appear and show them the way. A great big paw print in the sky.

"Carpe diem," he murmured at one point, as she attached one of the blurry cat portraits surreptitiously to a bus shelter.

"Huh?"

He looked pleasantly and inexplicably distracted, as if they were fulfilling a life-long mission, and the banalities of scotch tape were too middling to occupy his thoughts. "Seize the day, Penny."

"Oh, very helpful. I'm sure Peter Pan will purr all over knowing that you're on the case." She rolled her eyes at his half-hearted glare. "You and your Klingon."

"Latin, Penny. Latin."

She smiled knowingly and said nothing; he let her do the talking after that, which was surprising because usually you couldn't shut him up. But really, she was also touching his bag every five minutes (and his shirt, and his arm...) and there had been no admonishing over _that_ , so who knew where his mind was.

An hour and fifty-two minutes after setting out, the street lights began to flicker on, and it became harder and harder to wave down passing joggers without getting eyeballed or glared at, iPods being clicked onto pause and a sharp reply of _sorry, can't help_. So Penny stopped walking, waited patiently for the twelve seconds of preoccupied strides it took Sheldon to notice that she was no longer at his side, and together they turned back for home.

And an hour and fifty-three minutes after setting out, the sky parted, and down came the rain.

 

 

So it ended, as they came through the door to the sight of Leonard and Mrs. Barnaby. And bundled in the woman's arms, wet and blinking, was Peter Pan.

"Look, dear," she said, smiling benignly. "He came home!"

"Oh," said Penny.

Leonard took in the pair of them, panting slightly and dripping.

"What happened to your umbrella?"

"A dog stole it," began Sheldon—

"—He put it down at the bus stop and left it there," finished Penny.

"Why?" asked Leonard.

"Why? Oh, I don't know. Because he had a sudden goddamn desire to seize the day, that's why."

There was an awkward pause. A pause filled happily with a loud and continuous purr.

"You know, it was the strangest thing," Mrs. Barnaby said as she wandered to the stairs, oblivious to the silent communication going on around her. "There I was, waiting for what seemed an awful long time, thinking all sorts of bad things. And then, lo and behold, Leonard here appears at the door with none other than my Peter Pan, merry as you like, right at his heels." She paused by Sheldon's side and peered up at him. "You'll catch a cold, young man, standing there in wet clothes. Well. Goodnight, dear."

 

 

She steered Sheldon into the laundry room, ignoring Leonard's confused stare, ignoring the puddles of water on the lobby floor, and there she closed the door.

Latin is for schoolboys and cats, Penny decided. She could feel something thud and skid beneath the Superman emblem, his wide blue eyes following the movement of his shirt as it ran between her ink stained fingers. And she let him, saying nothing, because an hour and fifty-three minutes after setting out, the sky had parted, and without asking, quite possibly without thinking, he had taken her hand. And ran so fast that she thought they might fly.


End file.
